Consciousness is a social product, even for philosophers

Marx's comments on need are scattered, fragmentary, and often seemingly contradictory. Despite this, his thinking on the topic has been enormously influential, prompting a sustained interpretive endeavour to systematise those remarks into a unified theoretical position. This chapter critiques the mainstream interpretations that have arisen as a result through a close re-reading of the 1845–6 ‘German ideology’ manuscripts. Standard readings treat certain crucial passages therein as containing an early (if admittedly rudimentary and unfinished) version of Marx's mature ‘theory of need’. But in doing so, they wrongly sideline the polemical nature of the text and downplay Marx's political activism. Placing his political purposes front and centre, this chapter re-reads those passages not as a literal exposition of Marx and Engels's ‘thought on need’, but as a parodic showing-up of their Young Hegelian interlocutors. This targeted a form of philosophising that imagined theory could float free from the social-historical conditions it purported to analyse, including – crucially – the lived practical realities of human need. Against this, Marx and Engels insist that all thought, including theoretical thought, is embedded in concrete social life. Drawing a parallel with the later work of Wittgenstein, the chapter argues that, for Marx, need is not a neutral theoretical object, but part of the lived, practical context from which theoretical thought arises.